


Distill

by WhiteFoxKitsune (ProwlingThunder)



Series: Ink Stains On Paper [1]
Category: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers | Ronin Warriors
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Dimension Travel, F/M, Gen, Married Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 04:16:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1537184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/WhiteFoxKitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Mouri Cye wakes up in a world, and a body, and a life, that is most definitely not his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distill

Cye knew something was up the moment he opened his eyes. Partly because he was staring at himself, but mostly because he knew he had never owned a mirror that big, little lone planted it on the ceiling above a four-poster bed, and certainly he had never owned a four-poster bed in the first place.

Also because he was sharing it with a ghost.

Suzunagi hadn't woken yet, thankfully. His brain wasn't catching up with the rest of the world just yet, he was sure. Yesterday he had gone to bed after a small celebration; Mia and the guys-- and by proxy, their spouses-- had come down for his birthday, he had just turned twenty-one. He'd made sure his mother was well as she could be before retiring to his futon early, shooing his guests out and on their way to their resting-house. He had to open the shop the next morning.

This room didn't look like his. The bed was four-poster in the way four-poster beds aught to be, but each post was a European lamp post, candles installed and all. There was a set of balcony doors on the far wall, made of stained glass, painting a picture Cye knew better than any other; blue and purple and frosted white, the Mouri swan. It let in just enough light to see.

There had been a door in that wall, paper door slid closed and hiding the beach-front engawa. Cye had personally painted Torrent's insignia on the paper. It had been a delicate, time-consuming procedure, and he'd had to replace the paper twice because it was not like painting pottery at all. Paper bled considerably, and he had not been used to it.

But the rest of the room looked mostly the same. A few prints adorned the walls, the bowl his mother had made the day he was born sat on a low shelf with a few string-bound books. A curious copper-colored bird sat on a perch that matched in color; that was new.

Suzunagi tightened her grip around his waist, tugging herself a bit closer. Cye resisted the urge to throw her out of his bed, or throw himself out of the bed, or possibly scream. He took a breath and carefully detracted himself instead, picking up his dressing gown from beside the bed and trying not to hyperventilate.

He was a grown man. He didn't need anyone to explain the intricacies of an intimate relationship to him. He didn't need anyone to explain to him what must have happened here. He needed someone to explain why he was here, of course, because this was not his life. 

But first, he needed a bath.

The bathroom did not have his traditional tub, a stack of fire wood, or his wash bucket. It did have a bunch of exposed copper pipping, a frosted glass box, and an entire missing wall, exposing his bathroom to the world at large. Cye could see fishing boats out there in Hagi bay.

Cye stared at them until he felt thin arms curl around his midsection and a nose between his shoulder blades as Suzunagi buried her face in his back.

Turned out the bath wasn't even a shower. It was a sauna. Steam-bath, Suzunagi called it, reminding him they always bathed together and asking him if he felt all right when Cye balked at the idea.

x-x-x-x

The bedroom, it turned out, was the only thing familiar to Cye despite all it's differences. The living room held a grandfather clock and a dozen or so more copper birds, a rug that was doubtlessly from Saudi Arabia, and a water-color painting of Mount Fuji. The funerary painting of his father sat in the corner next to a fresh adornment of flowers and a bowl of unlit incense sticks, and right next to it was a photograph of his mother that sucked all the air from his lungs.

The kitchen was worse. Instead of his cooking area, a stove and coffee pot had been installed, along with three-wall counters and dozens of cabinets, as opposed to his baskets and stonework cases. Suzunagi shooed him from the kitchen with a metal spoon, citing that he would sooner burn down the house then manage to cook breakfast. Cye left her to it, disoriented by the suggestion, and went to open the shop.

Which wasn't, it seemed, a shop at all. The storefront was a solid wall, and the shelves that usually held his pottery beheld clocks and watches, unused gears and wires and bits and bobs. His pottery wheel was a bench table, bearing some half-finished project Cye couldn't fathom the purpose of. His pottery kiln was replaced with a giant bonsai tree, blue ribbons and strips of paper hanging from the branches. A hamaya sacred arrow was planted at the base, roots tangled around the shaft, preventing it from being recovered.

Cye wondered why a hamaya was stuck to the base of his bonsai. It was the only living thing in his home, that tree-- well, besides himself, and possibly Suzunagi but she'd been a ghost last night, just a phantom that had passed away years ago, lifetimes ago, before Cye was ever born-- and something told him it was important. The tree, and the arrow.

Everything else was... well. It looked like something Rowen had described to him once, back during the war. Steampunk, he thought Rowen had called it; a genre of books-- and who would have thought Rowen liked to read-- where everything had been stuck in the Victorian Era, and everything from cars to trains to... intimacy substitutes was powered by steam.

Steam, which was created by heat and water. Cye was here, and he could feel a faint, ghost-thin trail that whispered promises of the water, that echoed familiarity, that couldn't be anything but Torrent, calling out to him. Cye was here, and Torrent was here; what about Ryou? The others must be here too, if he and Torrent were.

Cye turned his attention away from his workshop entirely and started hunting for the trimming pliers. If he had a bonzai, no matter how large, he surely had the tools to care for it. They were buried under about a dozen different gears of various sizes, and between that and the way the training wires were digging into the bark meant they hadn't been used in a while, but he came up victorious anyway.

He took a breath and set to work, leaning on the faint thread of Torrent. This was a meditation Sage had shown him, last year, and without Torrent to settle his mind, Cye thought he would need it more then he used to.

x-x-x-x

The rest of the world was not so bad. After breakfast, Suzunagi began to dress to go shopping, and Cye found himself dressing to go alongside her. His wardrobe still had the pale blue, white, and gold he had flooded it with after diving for Torrent, though many of his more modern clothes were gone. He had no jeans, or tee-shirts, or tennis shoes. Torrent was not in his closet, either, but that, at least, Cye had suspected.

He ended up dressed in a blue so pale it was nearly gray, forwent the haori coat, and tried desperately to ignore the golden Mouri swan stitched into his clothes as he escorted Suzunagi out of the house and down the street. Not that he didn't like the family kamon, but he had wore Torrent's swirl for so many years, it just felt weird to wear the swan again.

But on the outside, Hagi looked just as he had left it. It was still the traditional castle-town he had left. Most of the people were dressed by tradition, except the tourists, who were clearly tourists because residual memories of previous armor-bearers hadn't seen petticoats like that since the Victorian era, and that was a parasol made out of metal and lace, and everybody was carrying folding fans.

Everybody.

Even some of the guys.

Cye suspected that was one of the things the tourists had picked up from the people here in Hagi. Although it had been illegal in his world to openly carry swords for some time, none of the extended Mouri clan or incidental families under their care liked to be without protection, and everyone carried a steel-ribbed war fan as a result. Cye had one in his sash even now, and Suzunagi, blessedly, carried one spread open to hide her face. 

It was nice to know they were still influencing tourists.

It was less nice to overhear some of those tourists calling him the “Master of Hagi” and scuttling out of his site, as though he were some sort of crazed king. But the locals sent him invisible smiles and curt nods of the head, and Cye found himself capable of ignoring the strangers, using distant kin as a proper distraction.

Those, at least, he knew the names of. There were some dressed as he knew they would never be, normally, and others who should be married by now clearly still single, and even more who he knew had always been happily without a companion sporting one. And at least one... untraditional couple that never would have been allowed.

Nothing was as it should have been. Cye tried not to think about the differences, tried to find the similarities-- but it was hard, with Suzunagi's hand in the crook of his elbow.

x-x-x-x

The truth of the matter was that Cye hadn't expected to feel so vulnerable, so exposed.

He had escorted Suzunagi to all the shops she had felt she needed to go to, the whole time realizing that for the first time since his youth, he was walking these streets without Torrent. It had been an uncomfortable and altogether unwelcome feeling, but it had nestled in his breast throughout the day and had not lifted, only growing heavier as dusk approached.

Suzunagi made shark-fin soup for dinner, and burst into tears of confusion and disappointment when Cye refused to eat it. He just couldn't; it turned his stomach to even fathom it. To think about trying.

Why she was so emotional was an issue Cye did not want contemplate at all, but even still, it was after moon-rise before he realized that his feeling was not a emotion after all, but Torrent, beckoning to him.

Far be it from him to tell it no.

x-x-x-x

Cye relished the feeling of his toes buried in sand as he made his way down the beach to the surf, sandals and tabi discarded by the balcony that used to be the engawa. In his own world, the pottery shop had been selling well, and business had been booming. He had not had the chance to come out to the beach in weeks, and it lightened his heart every step he took closer to Torrent's reassuring sense of self. 

He had loved the water since the day he was born, his mother had told him once, and Cye had never doubted it. It was little wonder that his armor had been Torrent, the oceans and rivers and rain all held under the command of one thing.

At it's most powerful, the original armor Torrent had been crafted from would have been truly frightening to behold, if for no other reason than that. 

Human beings were mostly comprised of water, after all.

But this was a world where everything seemed to be the lovechild of his armor and Ryou's. Even the unfamiliar boats in Hagi's familiar bay seemed to be run of steam. The lights in his home were run off electricity, generated by steam-- which Cye would likely never figure out the conversion thereof, but it existed, and apparently his other self, the one meant to be here, was the exact reason it did.

If the fish under the water were carrying pipes and canes and umbrellas, Cye wouldn't be entirely surprised.

“Cye, stop!” He heard Suzunagi's cry when water began to lap at his toes, and froze, breath seizing in his throat. She sounded... terrified. For him?

He didn't turn around though, listened to bare feet pound across the sand, felt thin fingers grip at his arm. She held on tight, and her grip shook. “Don't.. I know I haven't been my best, I know I've upset you, but please don't--”

They must have been newlyweds, his other and she. Cye could understand the attraction; Suzunagi had been an angry spirit in his world, a lost soul, but he hadn't always known that. He'd chased a pretty girl being attacked by monsters, desperate to save her even if it meant destroying his whole soul. Desperate to save someone, anyone. To do something right.

“I'll do better, I will, just don't go in the water.”

But Cye wanted to be in the water, the surface above his whole body, diving down and down and down. He wanted to hold Torrent's orb between his fingers, and come up victorious, the way he had when he was fourteen.

He wanted to sooth this other's wife, and that he could do here, now, and he did it first, resting fingers calloused by this stranger's life over her hands. Suzunagi jumped at his touch, and his heart wrenched. “Shh. Tell me what's wrong.”

He could see her now, in the edge of his vision. She swallowed, worrying her lower lip nervously. “..I.. I know you think I'm superstitious. But my family did have visions, and... you.. you've lost your family to the water, and I..” 

Cye abruptly realized the body he was currently in seemed to want to be anywhere else but the eddies of the surf.

It wasn't the body Cye had gone to bed in last night, even though it had... most of the scars he had acquired in his life. Cye's real body had the muscles of a swimmer, everything streamlined and toned from a lifetime in the water and years as Torrent's bearer. This body wasn't much bigger, muscle-wise, but they felt like they had been built a different way, like his tinkering in the used-to-be pottery shop had built it, like it had never touched the water. 

Or, that it had, but it was afraid of going back.

Cye bristled at his own misgivings. He would have Torrent back, he didn't feel whole without it. But he hated to upset her. Suzunagi had been... trying her best, even if she'd meant to lock them up in a world so they could never die on account of the armors. She had been trying to save them. And this one had been so understanding to him all day, since he'd woken up, despite that he must have been driving her absolutely mad, not being the one she knew.

“I don't want to loose you. Please. There's something in the water.”

“There is,” Cye agreed, and she jerked and seemed to really look at him for the first time since she touched him. Cye gauged distance and depth in his mind, only half paying attention to it. Torrent's orb sat on the bottom, a single pearl in a bed of oysters. Finding it was half luck and diving for it, half foolishness. He hadn't been the first person to dive for the orb since his father's death, but he'd been the first to bring it back up.

He could do it again.

“--I... there is?”

“Yes.” Suzunagi looked truly troubled by this news, though. Cye sought to reassure her, wondering if this was how the one he knew would have been, had fate been kinder to her. “There's a family heirloom at the bottom. I'm going to bring it back up.”

“But you can't swim!” He couldn't? He started to protest--

Patted her fingers instead, and drew away, out of her grip. “Easy. I will come back up. I can't lie, you know.”

“...I know. You told me.”

“I can't lie.” Cye promised, briefly touching his fingers to his forehead. He could feel the low pulse of the kanji on his forehead, knew it was visible by the way she jerked, and smiled softly at her. “I will come up to you. With my heirloom. And then...” Cye didn't know what would happen after that. This wasn't his world, and it didn't feel right to be married to another man's wife, even if the other man was him. Even if this other man ate fish and shark, and tinkered with gears and wires.

He had a feeling the bonsai in his shop was Suzunagi's, not his own.

Suzunagi frowned at him, troubled, and then those green eyes of hers sharpened. “I'll be here until you come back up. Don't make me a widow, Lord Mouri!”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

But it was leave to go, and Cye took it.

It felt so good to be in the water again.

x-x-x-x

Torrent glittered from a nest of stones, pale and blue and glowing, the only light this deep. 

Cye focused on it, a guiding light he didn't need, with the steady thrumming of the ocean in the back of his mind, luring him closer to the familiar armor.

He considered Suzunagi, waiting for him on the beach-- his other's wife, precious and special and familiar in her unfamiliarity. He considered the world she lived in, a world he didn't know-- Rowen's fictional steampunk books, that clearly had never faced Talpa's wrath, that might fare better when it did, but probably wouldn't. He considered the Cye that belonged here, that could be anywhere-- Cye's world, no world, alive, dead.

But more than anything he considered Torrent, and what it meant for him and his other both when he closed his fingers around the orb and let in everything he knew was always meant to be his.

I'll do it, he thought, and Torrent purred at him. I'll do it for you. I already know how.

There was a war coming, and this time, Cye was ready for it.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a Steampunk-themed contest entry for a dA group known as **foreverroninwarriror**
> 
> The dA artist **impluvium** made a beautiful piece of fanart to commemorate the contest.  
>  http://impluvium.deviantart.com/art/Distill-Illustration-for-WhiteFoxKitsune-401652024


End file.
